Linux Blog

This is not really “shell scripting” but the end result is some more bash scripts in my bin directory so what the hell? It’s going in the shell script section because its Sunday. So what?

I like to listen to music on my Windows box while I work on my Linux box. Online radio and other sounds, just get in the way too much. One of the things I wanted to do for a while was remotely control my volume so I didn’t have to use my KVM to switch over to change the volume when ever anyone came in my office.

Its actually pretty easy to control your windows volume from Linux.

At first I thought, I’d create a dummy audio device, and some how map it over. Then I figured that was overkill and I’d try something a bit easier. I have SSH via Cygwin, so all I needed was a way to control the volume locally, and I could execute the command with SSH. Having no volume utilities jump at me when I looked through the Cygwin repositories I went to look for something else.

NirCmd is an awesome utility, giving me and other Windows users the ability to do things that Linux users may take for granted, you can read about it here: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html after installing it, and making sure that my corporate AV didn’t throw a hissy, it was just a matter of dumping some scripts in my bin directory and chmodding them so they would run.

There was a display in a local library showcasing “What’s old is new again” Basically showing the similarities between new and older newspapers and the cartoons in them. It may have something to do with the NY Times tour, but maybe not. All I know is it was there the other day, and now I go to write about it – GONE. Many of the same concepts such as recession “funnies” are popping up again. What so these journalists and cartoonist’s have it easy eh? All they have to do to get their job done is find some old drawing and change it a little. Well, I’m jumping on the bandwagon folks. Here are two “What’s old is New!” Articles: Living without WindowsShell Scripting 101
Since they’ve been written we’ve learned a lot, new concepts are out there but while they are somewhat older, the concepts still apply. As everything old they enjoy receiving comments but don’t take criticism well. They know their faults such as bad spelling and grammar but their ageing and refuse to acknowledge their flaws unless you directly point them out. Give them a read and talk to them before they die and go to internet Heaven (or Hell).

Using proprietary software to some Linux users is considered a sin, right up there with not reading the manual. Not everyone that runs Linux feels this way. I for one don’t mind using a commercial / propriety product if the product serves the purpose well, and perhaps better than an open source implementation.

Take VMWare server for example. Although it does have its problems, it works very well for virtualization. Its pretty stable, has a good interface, works well and most of all is free. I have no problem installing and using this as long as it works. I’ve been using it for a while, its what I’m used to and I have no problems with it. The moment VMWare Server stops working, I’ll try to find another alternative. Be it open source or not.

I don’t get why some people are so into the open source movement. Not tainting a system to me has no clear advantages. If I were to not install any proprietary software I would hardly be able to use my Linux box. Think about it, no Java (ok, I’d have the IcedTea runtime and GCJ), but no supported Java for Tomcat / Eclipse, I’d have no Flash, hardly any video codecs and no 3D accelerated graphics. My virtualization, may or may not work depending on what day of the week it was or if I had supported hardware. There is probably a whole lot more that I am missing that I don’t even know about.

So, I’m just interested to know what is every one else’s take on using proprietary software? Am I alone in being “fine” with installing closed source / proprietary software? Is my computer going to go to robot hell and sing with Bender for eternity? Please let me know your thoughts.

What links -g is, is the text based web browser “links” in it’s own X window. This gives it the ability to display images which is very neat actually.

Neat right?
Links -g still uses the same old links keys that we are used to from our cli versions that we love so dear. And if you don’t use gpm, you can now use your mouse along with your browser. However if your experienced with gpm this feature may be old news to you.So your asking yourself, “Why the hell do I care about this?” well links -g is an amazingly fast web browser. So if your like me and completely upset at the horrid speed of today’s full featured web browsers… Opera, Firefox, or if your in MacOS Safari, and IE for Windows, then you will love the super fast speed of links -g. Also if your the type of person I am who just flat out likes the simple stuff, or the power user using a nice tiling window manager like dwm or something and you want to be able to display images in your web browser, then you will love links -g.

Sounds great eh? Well it truly is there are drawbacks however most of who will want to use links -g don’t mind these so called drawbacks.
1. Flash.
OK OK so it doesn’t support flash playback…big deal, hey it’s a TEXT based web browser that just happens to be running in X so to support images. You have to give it credit for doing that. And doing that very well.
2. No built in file browser.
OK for this you might be wondering, “What file browser in my web browser?” Well there is a file browser in Web browsers such as Firefox and Opera. These file browsers allow you do do things like pick a file you want to upload to say Photobucket or something. It can still be done, you just need to know where on your system, the file you want to upload is.
3. Other animation software (Java… etc.)
Well you can’t just expect this thing to have support for super cool animation effects from Java because it just doesn’t have a Java plug-in. Note that this is NOT Javascript. Javascript and Java are two different technologies. Javascript is fully supported under links -g.

To install:

In Gentoo:
Make sure you have the proper use flags set up….(png, jpeg, svga, tiff, javascript, X, and ssl if you want it.

emerge -av links

In Arch Linux:
Everything should be set up for you on Arch so just make sure you have libsvga installed (it may be installed when you install links as a dependency).